Tagged With labels

I recently purchased a few smart bulbs and have plans to expand my collection of smart lights. I did notice a small inconvenience during setup, however: It was hard to tell which bulb was which without staring into an app. So I added a visual aid to my bulbs using emoji stickers. It's a lot easier to see the "banana" light is out instead of trying to figure out which bulb is "Hue living room bulb 7" while your ceiling fan is off.

Glass jars and bottles are infinitely reusable, but the label doesn't always stay applicable for very long. Luckily, the cheapest method for removing the label and its sticky adhesive is also the laziest.

Predicting the future is near impossible -- but that doesn‘t stop us all from having a red hot go. Human beings have been predicting the future since the beginning of history and the results range from the hilarious to the downright uncanny.

One thing all future predictions have in common: they‘re rooted in our current understanding of how the world works. It‘s difficult to escape that mindset. We have no idea how technology will evolve, so our ideas are connected to the technology of today.

Clear stickers look great on windshields and other transparent surfaces, but printing your own costs quite a bit. With a little elbow grease, you can make custom clear labels for a fraction of the price.

The last time we mentioned Labeley, it was best at making custom labels for homebrewed beer, without forcing you into a complicated image editor. It's still great for that, but the webapp can now make more labels for more occasions, and can even professionally print them for you if you want.

A good label maker can be portable and hand-held, attached to your computer via USB, or somewhere in between. It needs to print good labels that are readable and that will last, whether they're in a filing cabinet, your pantry, or your freezer. This week we're looking at five of the best.

If you use your inbox as a to-do list, you'll need a good system for keeping track of your tasks and prioritising them. Systems rockstar Justin Garrison offers this email labelling method: prioritise emails by severity level. Syslog, or the message logging system used by computers, provides a framework.

If you have the Gmail "Smartlabels" (or Smart Labels) lab enabled, the next time you log in, you'll see more options for automatically categorising your emails. New emails can be auto labelled as purchases, travel and finance -- in addition to the social, promotions, updates/notifications and forums labels already in place.

A while back, Gmail introduced "Smart Labels" for bulk email, notifications, forums and social updates. You can't edit these filters, but you can automatically archive matching messages, so those updates don't fill up your inbox.

Up until today, you could only make new Gmail labels that were 40 characters long—which could sometimes prove difficult. Google has now extended that limit to 225 characters, giving you a lot more leeway in how you organise your messages.

If the black-Sharpie-on-a-box doesn't help you easily differentiate between boxes when you're moving, Worldlabel's free PDF will save you time and energy by letting you just stick on your custom labels, whether for different rooms, fragile items or "this side up" boxes.

Google added two new features to Gmail Labs today: The often-requested Nested Labels - for those of you who like folder-style label nesting - and "Message Sneak Peek", which provides a quick look at an email when you right-click the message in your inbox.

Party-going is tough when you don't know anyone. Then there's those awkward "Crap! I can't remember your name" moments. Be a good host and print out some customised name tags to hand out to guests at your next bash.

The latest Gmail Labs offering does something that Greasemonkey hackers (and our own Better Gmail extension) have long found useful—hide label tags from the inbox, freeing up more screen space for subject lines and message previews.

Google's data-crunching ways found that the majority of Gmail users aren't actually using the webmail service's labels. Starting today, those label names get higher placement, and drag-and-drop labelling aims to make Gmail's labels more like familiar email folders.

Firefox only: Gmail's powerful filters and labels make it great for organizing, but when you have multiple labels assigned to a message the subject barely fits on the screen—unless you auto-hide them with a script.

AutofillPDF Labels is a handy web tool for anyone who's wanted to print their own labels of any kind, but loathes the idea of manually filling out the printing template over and over. Many print-your-own label packets come with links or CDs that get you a pre-formatted Word document to fill out. Unless you're getting married or sending out other invitations, though, you'll usually end up putting the same thing on each label, and Ctrl-C/V-ing your precious time away. This handy webapp pops open a scripted PDF file on any system, while letting you change the font, styling, size, and other text properties, and also add images. In short, you create one label, and the PDF fills out the rest of them for you. The templates include CD labels, address or mailing, file folder labels, and even non-sticky business cards. Free to use, no sign-up required, and it works best with Adobe Acrobat (the free reader).

Today Gmail will begin rolling out a new feature to improve your email labelling workflow and mitigate folder-vs.-label confusion with two new drop-down menus: Move to and Labels. Even better: Keyboard shortcuts and autocomplete are baked in. We're not seeing the updates in our accounts yet, but the new features are pretty simple. If you want to label an email, just click the Labels drop-down or hit 'L' on your keyboard and start typing; Gmail will autocomplete the label as you type. The Move to menu works the same but uses 'V' as the quick keyboard shortcut. When you apply a new label via the Move to menu, Gmail will apply the new label and automatically archive the email—mimicking folder behaviour while still sticking with Gmail's label structure. You've been able to access Gmail's More actions menu for quite some time using the period ('.') shortcut, but the label and move to shortcuts are a godsend for keyboard lovers and folder lovers alike. The Better Gmail extension has always included the very cool Gmail Macros script, which itself added new labels by pressing 'L' and then autocompleting labels, so this functionality will be easy to adopt for Gmail Macros users. (Though autocomplete for navigating to a new label from the keyboard with the 'G' shortcut would be nice, Google.) Is your account enabled yet? Let's hear how you like the changes in the comments.